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Capturing Footage to an External Hard Drive
I am editing my first project on Final Cut Pro – a feature length documentary. We have 20 hours of footage shot so far. Unfortunately, we don’t have funds the buy a deck. A few of our tapes have glitches on them from the shoot, and I’m not sure what caused these. (We’re filming on a DVX-100a in 24p advanced.)
The reason I’m writing though is because I purchased a 500gb external hard drive to upload all the footage to. Once it’s all uploaded there, I’ll do the logging of the footage from it.
I’m wondering if anyone can offer some insight into the best way to go about this. Do I just go into Final Cut Pro, capture footage in 20-minute clips and place them into bins and then save the project as a whole onto the external hard drive? If so, how do I then go through once all the footage is uploaded and log individual clips?
Or is there some other better way to do this (bearing in mind that we have to stick with this approach of uploading all the footage onto the external hard drive, then logging clips from the footage on the hard drive)?
Thanks,
Jay -
3 Replies
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Jay,
I would probably do it pretty close to the way you are describing.
The downside to having longer clips would be that if you got a corrupt clip or something that require a redigitise, you’re going to have to redigitise longer clips. I find it easier to manage, though within the project.
Once you’ve got your source tapes captured, you can bring up your tape in the viewer, set an in and out point, and create a subclip by either dragging from the viewer to a bin, or pressing Apple+U (I’m pretty sure that’s the shortcut from memory). You can then rename, rearrange, and pretty much treat your subclip as a new master clip in most ways.
The only other thing on a project like this, is to offer a gentle reminder to put a reliable project backup mechanism into your workflow! :o)
Good luck!
e.
This creates a subclip that references back to your original source clip – it does not create new media, so don’t delete your orginal master clip!
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Jay,
I would take a little different approach…digitizing your footage is one of the most critical parts of your project. I would take the time to log all of your footage correctly before you digitize. It will give you much better media management. If you digitize your footage with out labeling your clips, reels, etc. Then all of you clips will be ‘untitled’ If something happened and you needed to located the original clip, it can be very difficult if all your clips are untitled.
Enzo’s approach is great if you know what your doing and create new master clips with every clip you like, but if you forget to create a new master clip, delete a clip, or lose one, then it can affect a lot of your clips if you’re using a 20 min chunk of video. Make sense?Good Luck,
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
Todd is absolutely correct. When you have logged a clip in FCP then the actual media file on the disk gets teh exact same name. Why is this critical, well, when you get three months into things and you have brought in more tapes and you have hundreds of pieces of media named Untitled you are asking for a boatload of trouble.
Managing large projects is what I do and I have a very specific method for naming media and clips. All clips are first logged as their tape # then clip number. I never capture more than ten minutes. The naming convention Tape_001_Clip_001 and so on carries over to the media file name. each of these then gets it’s own folder. TAPE_001, TAPE 002 etc and so on. It is also nice to put shoot dates on the Folder name.
Why? Is this over kill. Guess what. I just took a whole project like this compressed it to samller QT files and copies it to another drive so that the director could log favorite shots and screen interviews, the clip name is in the top of the QT window and the timecode can be seen with third party software, so see where we are going with this.
If I want to then subclip and rename clips no problem. It all references back to the media. This is also ey usefull if you happened to enter the wrong reel number for a tape, etc, because you won’t get caught.
If there is somthing to be anal about with large project management then it is definitely naming and numbering reels and clips correctly at the onset.
If you don’t want to be one of those people scrambling at the online then line the ducks up now.
David
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